Google Study About Manual Hijacking

Account hijacking is a thing that happens a lot. There are different types of hijacking of which one of the most common is mass hijacking. In this case, an automated process uses compromised systems to send out spam messages, malware and phishing campaigns to get even more accounts hijacked. This kind of attacks are usually targeting political institutions, universities, governments and corporations.

Another type of hijacking is so called manual hijacking. This type of attacks are targeting normal users and are done by individuals instead of automated botnets.

Google have published a study they made about manual hijacking. This study can be viewed here (as a pdf document)

Hotmail Introduces New Features To Prevent Email Account Hijacking

Email account hijacking has been one of the top problems I've faced while helping users on security forums. Big part of affected accounts is from Hotmail. Hotmail team knows about the problem and have developed two new features in order to help prevent account hijacking.

One of these is to let Hotmail user report if they suspect some of their friend's account as compromised. In situation like this user can take advantage of "My friend's been hacked!" feature on the "Mark as" menu. Alternatively, account can be reported as compromised while moving message to the Junk folder. Reporting isn't limited to Hotmail accounts only but accounts from other email providers like Yahoo and Gmail can be reported too. The second new feature prevents user from using common passwords as their account password.

More about these features can be read from related blog post in Windows Live blog.